


Tammany's Doctor Who Meta-Drop

by Tammany



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-10
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-04-30 22:50:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5182586
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ok. I already have one honkin' big meta dump over on the Sherlock pages, and some of you may know me from there. I am currently having a grand time watching Series 9 of New Who, and it's triggering a few meta essays from me. After discussion with friends, associates, and readers, I have decided that rather than try and insert Whovian meta into an otherwise Sherlockian meta-dump, I should open a new dump here.</p><p>So, going in, you probably want to know that I adore Capaldi's Doctor, River Song, and actually think quite well of Steve Moffat's work. Not to say any of that is perfect, but that I'm probably going to peeve the b'dickens out of you if you despise them. Either way you're welcome to come read and take polite part in discussions.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Rhapsody on River Song and Advance Planning

 

 

Rhapsody on River Song and Long-Term Planning

Having worked quite hard yesterday I have taken a chunk of time off today to review some episodes. Here is the thing...on the one hand Moffat has always been a bit vague about his long-term goals for River Song. On the other hand, he's let it be known that he planned "Day of the Doctor" with the current two-parter, "The Zygon Invasion" and "The Zygon Inversion" in mind.... Plans set in place two years in advance. I rewatched "Day of the Doctor" twice today, and am entirely comfortable with Moffat's claim. Osgood and her twin, and the pointed choice NOT to reveal how the human/zygon treaty was resolved, feel far more like careful planning to me than like Moffat coming in later and cannibalizing his own work.

On top of that, the entire end of Matt Smith's tenure, tangled with the 50th, and the choice of Capaldi as the new Doctor, absolutely forced a lot of thought, analysis, and planning on all the Who admin. I'm not saying that as a guess, but as a self-evident fact. Whatever else one comes away with from the shows and specials and the various interviews connected with all that, one thing is obvious--for the key group that runs the show, the 50th and the Smith-Capaldi stuff was an immersion experience. I have felt all along that Smith's last year, the Anniversary materials, the Christmas special, and the new Capaldi material were all integrated as much as possible to hit the reset button, rebooting the show again with many corrections for drift over the decades....and with a clear goal of trying to set the show up to go another 50 years. Things were PLANNED.

Which brings me to River.

Moffat has said that Russell Davies, on hearing of Capaldi's casting, immediately thought of the pairing with River. Like many of us, RD apparently thought they would be phenomenal together. So there is no question that Moffat was flagged right away to think about that option. He would have been thinking about it at the time he wrote "The Name of the Doctor."

So what did he do with River in a heavily planned show setting up for The Post-Anniversary New Capaldi era?

First, he brought her back when there was no actual reason to do so. River's official story could plausibly be said to end with Season 5's "The Wedding of River Song," or, at the latest, with the loss of Amy and Rory in "Angels Take Manhattan." At that point the only real loose end left would have been actually demonstrating the "last" meeting descibed in "Forest of the Dead." And there was no need for that--why show what was already so evocatively suggested?

The only real problem remaining...which has always seemed obvious to me...is why the Doctor never had River revived and re-embodied by the library, as he had Donna and all the others "saved" brought back. It is such a huge loophole, after all. She's there, she is "saved." Why not bring her and her team back?

And of course, we have never yet seen "her" version of the sonic screwdriver in the Doctor's possession and use. Her sonic was of a unique design....

Which does have me wondering why the current Doctor is wandering around using sonic sunglasses. And being oddly evassive about why the switch. And it leads to one of the themes of this autumn's episodes--the Doctor's need for both long-term associates, even when they are enemies/frenemies (Missy/the Master, Davros, and now Ashildr/Me), and short-term (the many companions). River, like Jack Harkness, sits in an odd sweet spot between the extremes.

Moffat once said he didn't really see the point in bringing back a character whose arc was done--whose story was told. He said it in direct connection to questions about River's post-Wedding future...while as usual evading firm commitments. River's story could be done. Nothing more of her first arc has to be told. But there are loopholes that would let her come back, and there are ways she performs useful character functions in relation to the Doctor. She is simultaneously independent of him and uniquely intimate. Like Missy, she is a peer in ways no mere companion is....though Donna Noble came close. If revived...well, if revived, there is no clear fictional reason she might not even regain her original capacity to regenerate, lost when she revived the Doctor in "Let's Kill Hitler." She could be a full Time Lady. Or at least an odd Tardis-human....

Hybrid. One more to flesh out Davros' report of prophecy.

She's got possibilities.

She will always be one of a small set of people who can claim a place as the Doctor's wife...and the only one we have seen who appears to be in a relationship most of us would recognize as spousal. For better or worse, he acts married to her. She acts married to him. It is a relationship writers could not previously do more than allude to or hint at. For yhat alone it offers unique storytelling chops.

Which brings me back to "The Name of the Doctor." River was brought back when the episode could easily enough have been structured without her. Even bits like letting the Great Intelligence into the Tardis could have been resolved other ways.

The return did a few very interesting things.

It reminded viewers that River outranks even Clara as the Doctor's peer and wife.  
It establishes her as retaining not only existence, but being spousally committed to the Doctor's well-being, even in "death." River is real enough to be known and summoned by Madame Vashtra, she is real enough to have a mind-link with Clara, she is real enough that even though the Doctor thinks of her as an echo, he slways sees and hears her when she is there.  
It establishes that the Doctor loves her. Really loves her...so much that rather than explore the phenomenon of her "echo," he ignores it because he fears the pain of interacting with her "shade" will hurt him too deeply. The final kiss between them is heartbreaking not for her sorrow, but for his.  
And, last?  
It establishes that her story currently ends with a comma, not a period. She tells us and the Doctor so with her point that she is there even when Clara, her anchor, is not--and with her jaunty "spoilers."

Moffat plans ahead. We know he does...and his admission that he used "Day of the Doctor" to intentionally set up "Zygons" not only confirms it, but demonstrates how far in advance he plans. Moffat planned the 50th Anniversary, the passing of Matt Smith's Doctor, and the transition to the Capaldi Doctor to a high degree, integrating almost everything, wasting almost nothing. Moffat knew that at least one respected former Who-runner, Davies, instantly thought of linking up River with Capaldi's Doctor. We know that the most obvious things accomplished by River's presence in "Name of the Doctor" reinforce the bond they share, confirm her continued existence, and point to future meetings.

So...all that being so, I would argue that, like the set-up work in "Day of the Doctor," River's presence in "Name of the Doctor" was the foundation-laying of a canny show-runner/screen writer. It's canny because it did not commit him so strongly there was no escape: actors get jobs abroad, get sick, new pairings can lack chemistry or viewer interest. It's wise not to tie yourself down. But it made River's return both plot-logical and emotionally logical. It set the stage.

Now we are getting River back for Christmas--another cagy move. On the one hand, a show runner can make Christmas specials stand-alones if the elements involved do not work. On the other hand...what is a more powerful Christmas vibe than reuniting with those we most love?

None of this is certain, really. But...I like watching Moffat work. He is interesting...and he does make plans.

 

 

 

 


	2. The Clara is Dead--Long Live the Clara!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> First thoughts on having seen "Face the Raven."

The Clara is dead—long live the Clara!

 

Well, she said, they went and did it—they killed Clara. Already there are, of course, people wondering if Moffat will bring her back. And people are already pointing out that Jenna Coleman is due to show up for the finale. People are muttering about shoddy, second-rate deaths that won’t stick, and Moffat’s affinity for them. The question is there... Is she dead—or just pretending, more or less?

My own position?

Absolutely.

Absolutely what?

Both. Dead and faking. Both.

Is Clara Oswald, lover of Danny Pink, mortal teacher at Coal Hill School, dead?  Yes, I think she is. I think she has to be. If Moffat is doing what I think he’s doing, she is stone-cold dead. Her corpse will be found in the morning by the mystified police. Her poor students will mourn. Her fellow faculty members will try to comfort themselves with the notion that she’s “with Danny now,” and will assure themselves she’s never been quite right since he died. Dead. Dead-dead-dead.

Is the Impossible Girl dead?

No. Can’t be, as long as The Doctor’s time-squiggle endures. Indeed, the Impossible Girl is the only character who absolutely must be possible in any timeline the Doctor could ever enter…the only character who can’t be erased from existence unless he is, and unless it takes. Erased time-lines mean so little to The Doctor. What he’s experienced may have happened in loops that no longer exist—but his experience within those loops appears to endure, if only as a memory trace and a temporal loop in his last resting place—whether that proves to be at Trenzalore in the end, or elsewhere. Clara Oswald entered the Doctor’s time signature, scrawled as illegibly as any Doctor’s prescription, and she stopped being purely Clara Oswald, then. She entered into different lives and different selves, she forgot and remembered and forgot what she was supposed to remember, and always, the Doctor was there. Or, to reverse it, to the Doctor she was always there, a figure he only began to remember when he ran into the Souffle Girl.

That aspect of Clara Oswald is utterly, unfailingly alive. She is not going anywhere—she’s forged permanently onto the Doctor’s time-line. She’ll be with him till the end of his days and quite possibly with him in that weird Time Lord death of tangled time.

Moffat, for once in his life, can absolutely kill a character while respecting the bouncing yo-yo trope of the genre. It’s not his fault that pop culture almost demands returning characters.  It does, it has, it will. Comics and SF shows and fantasies and for that matter just plain American serial art begs for deaths no more permanent than dreams… Moffat knows that, and knows that in Doctor Who the very nature of the show’s universe makes complete, binding, inescapable death a bit of a challenge. It’s like the reverse of that wonderful [safety ad](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJNR2EpS0jw) put out a year ago—so many dumb ways to resurrect or regenerate! Moffat knows that. He goes with it. He makes it work in his favor as much as he can.

 

But in Clara he’s created a character who lets him have it both ways. Clara is dead. Long live Clara.

What does that get us? For once, it gets us a character whose death can be explored as death—and who can allow us to examine the Doctor’s way of “facing the Raven” of a special loved-one dying. It can even be resolved by the Impossible Girl’s return, a beautiful and effective metaphor for the ways our beloved ones stay with us, haunting our lives, saving our sanity, shadowed on other faces, seen in the movement of a stranger on the street. The Impossible Girl may return, and yet—she will never again be Clara. She has died, and the Doctor has to mourn her, take responsibility for his role in her downfall, cope with his loss, and move on.

Moffat can kill Clara and make it stick—and get so much mileage out of that!

When—and I do mean when, and not if—the Impossible Girl returns again, there will be many fans raising the wail that Moffat only gave in to his old trick of doing what the genre demands of him. What I am afraid many will miss is that, in Clara-The-Impossible-Girl, Moffat created the one character in all Doctor Who who can’t be killed outright, allowing him to kill her incarnations for realio=trulios, and who thus let him actually play the death card with a straight face, and watch the Doctor pant and rage and pound the walls, because “the Doctor doesn’t like endings.”

In odd way that makes it perfect that the Christmas special will have the Doctor encountering a River Song who does not know him, or recognize him, whom he must try to reconnect with. River, like Clara, has the potential to really die, yet really return—especially if her regenerative abilities are returned to her. The Impossible Girl can be the face that comes back into his life, and never again knows him, because Clara is dead. River can be the soul who comes back over and over, in and out of sync, remembering or not remembering, chirping “spoilers” or frowning in confusion when the time line has jumped and she’s out of the loop.

The show itself has needed something like River and Clara for a long time. Jack Harkness provided a little bit of that. The Master and the other recurring enemies and frenemies did that. But to a large extent the show, for some insane reason, never gave the Doctor a sufficiently permanent framework of people existing in four dimensions to explore that kind of enduring relationship—leaving us with entire continents of story and character potential unexamined. Now, for many reasons, Moffat has been assembling tools that will let him bring four-D characters into the mix more and more.

Anyway. As you can guess, I liked this ep and really look forward to seeing the remaining three. I hope this time I’ve guessed Moffat’s intentions right. Clara died a good death in this—a true, believable death entirely in keeping with her character’s flaws and virtues. I hope Moffat takes that death and uses it well. I hope, too, he uses the Impossible Girl who remains, rather than ret-conning his own arcs. She’s valuable as the ghost of Clara-dead-and-gone, and equally useful as an echo who can return in new and interesting forms on occasion, when you want to use her.

So—what did all y’all think?


	3. The Husbands of River Song... An Eternal Golden Braid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Different people will feel different ways about River Song, and about this Christmas story.  
> As a Christmas story I thought it was--ok. Nice episode. Fun. Funny enough.
> 
> As a Doctor and River story, though, I think it was both beautiful and important...and Moffat's way of making sure tht if people wanted, River would be--could be--part of the Doctor's story forever. His Wife, and he her one True Husband.
> 
> This is long, and a bit rambly, but I'm up against seven series' work of disjointed time travel and two people who lived and loved all cattywampus to common time and sense.
> 
> The quotes from "Forest of the Dead" came from www.chakoteya.net--and thanks for them! The quotes from "Husband" were picked out with some agony watching the end over and over until I got it more or less right.

RIVER [OC]: Now and then, every once in a very long while, every day in a million days, when the wind stands fair, and the Doctor comes to call   
(He snaps his fingers again and the door closes.)

**[Children's bedroom]**

(River closes her diary.)   
RIVER: Everybody lives.   
(She kisses Charlotte goodnight and looks at Ella and Joshua.)   
RIVER: Sweet dreams, everyone.

 

Doctor: All anyone will tell you is when the wind stands fair and the night is perfect, when you least expect it, and always, when you need it the most, there is a song.

River: So…Assuming tonight is all we have left…

Doctor: I didn’t say that…

River: How long is a night on Derillium?

Doctor: Twenty-four years.

River: I hate you…

Doctor: No, you don’t.

 

There is a logic to stories—some stories you can believe. Some you cannot. And some—lie, and lie, and tell the truth, and untangling it is an art form.

We met River Song years ago—back in 2008, which is so long ago I can’t begin to say. The Doctor (Ten) met River Song for the very first time in his life, at least that he recalls. He meets her, learns almost certainly that she is something very, very special to him, (presumably his wife) and then he learns another thing—that she will willingly die for him rather than lose one second of the life they will experience together. And, being the Doctor, he finds a loophole—a perfectly logical loophole in some ways, and, yet, one that has always, always had an uneasy problem built in.

The doctor asks himself what he would do—what his future self would do—if he knew his special, beloved River Song was going to die, and he knew it. He concludes that he’d hide a neural relay chip in the sonic screwdriver he gives her, that will record her personality as an “echo” that Ten can then download into the memory core at the heart of the Library. And thus, ta-da, River Song is downloaded, and “saved,” to live for who knows how long as a recorded persona in a memory core.

What’s the glitch?

That in the same episode we see 4022 people “saved” to the same memory core—then revived by being “beamed” back into reality, their bodies and souls both saved….leaving the plain, unavoidable, obvious question of why River can’t be beamed back.

Fans, attempting to logic out the basis for River’s stuck status, have argued sensibly enough that she was “saved” to a memory chip only in terms of her mind—not her body. And that mental impression was fading at the time the Doctor managed to dump her. And that a similar “save” of Miss Evangelista’s mind—but not her body, which is devoured by the Vashta Nerada-- produced a physically warped version of her in the library’s stores. So, logically, River, while she may “look” right in the memory store, may not be in a condition that can be beamed back out.

It all seems to make sense, if you cut out the very question asked by Ten himself, as he tries to work out why his future self gives River a sonic screwdriver. He concludes as follows:

DOCTOR: Why? Why would I give her my screwdriver? Why would I do that? Thing is, future me had years to think about it, all those years to think of a way to save her, and what he did was give her a screwdriver. Why would I do that?   
(Because it also contains a neural relay, which has two green lights on it.)   
DOCTOR: Oh! Oh! Oh, look at that. I'm very good!   
DONNA: What have you done?   
DOCTOR: Saved her.

All of which makes sense from Ten’s point of view. Ten is caught up in his own perspective on time, and he’s thinking of the neural relay chip the same way he’s been thinking of Miss Evangelista and the other people on the team: as “ghosts.” Mere echoes. Yes, he is going to “save” that echo of River, but he’s used to thinking of the dead as dead…and of neural relays as containing an odd, sad, incomplete feedback.

But then we have to go back to the logic of the Doctor, and the question Ten asks, and more critical, what all of season nine has been set up to tell us.

We have just come off of Face the Raven, Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent, in which we are shown in absolute certainty how passionately the Doctor hates endings…and how hard he can fight to avoid them if he’s got even a bit of lead time…or a chance to ret-con his own reality. Ten is the Doctor who has lost Rose—and not yet destroyed Donna. Twelve/Thirteen is the Doctor who’s learned that even his limits can be retconned. Twelve is the Doctor who spends over four BILLION years resisting Clara’s death…and finds a way out. That Clara refuses his cleverness, and chooses her own path, and wipes his memory instead of the other way around does not change who Twelve is, in comparison with who Ten was.

Ten, having very cleverly saved River for his own future, can accept that in spite of all that, her own future from the moment he meets her onward, is a virtual future, and one he expects to fade. He still saved her, allowing him to meet her with some kind of hope in his heart. And we go from there through the entire tangled, twisted, complex loop-de-loop of Melody Pond/River Song, and Amy and Rory and time being chopped and rechopped into new shapes and odd forms, all leading, for River, back to the Library.

With one major, outstanding loop hole. No, two. No—many.

We know, for example, that with a template of her body, the Library could return River to life, just like it returns everyone else. This is not a small loophole in its own right.

We know that even a damaged “body” recorded from a memory of an echo—Miss Evangelista—can have her virtual body repaired by the Doctor.

We know that, for all Ten is perfectly happy with his victory over death, Ten is not the man who “loses” his beloved wife, River.  A victory that satisfies Ten is profoundly unlikely to satisfy Eleven. It is definitely unlikely to satisfy Twelve as we find him by the end of “The Husbands of River Song.”

That’s an important point to make: there is one central, critical set of questions asked in this episode: Does River Song “really” love the Doctor? He’s not sure—not in the face of her other marriages, or her denials over her own diary, or her other lovers. Does the Doctor “really” love River Song? Also an open question, in spite of Eleven’s final scene with her “ghost” in “The Name of the Doctor.” We’re invited into the Doctor’s head to feel the doubt—the uncertainty, the hurt feelings. The wary fear that he was wrong…that he was not loved. And, as the Doctor, we’re allowed to experience her answer—and then his.

Capaldi’s face is the vital thing to watch during the fight between River and the maître d’. You can watch the wheels spin, and the realizations tumble down, and, perhaps most marvelous of all, the joy and affection and love that opens up when he realizes that she loves him as much as he had always been given reason to believe—and more. “The sun. The stars.” That she has loved him that much, sacrificed that much, that she WILL sacrifice that much, and yet over all the years she has never believed he loved her.

The tenderness Capaldi lets through is a flood. A monsoon. It sweeps away the cold, grumpy, surly man and replaces him with River’s Husband…who adores her. And if we’re in any doubt of it, we then see the two battle, frantically, to save each other—to sacrifice for each other—during the crash.

Doctor: River--not one person on this ship—not one living thing—is worth you.

River: Or you…

And when he leans over her unconscious form his comment is, “Indestructable as ever…”

He needs her to be indestructible. He needs one person in his life to survive. To endure.

And he knows there are no promises. No happily ever afters. No eternities. She may be indestructible, but someday even that won’t be enough. And they’re on Derillium, facing the Singing Towers—facing a resolution that River has testified his prior self has avoided, and avoided, and avoided. Suggesting that time and time he’s concluded that the end is due, only to shy away from it. Evade it. Duck the doom that lies on them.

Which leads us back to Ten’s observation: Thing is, future me had years to think about it, all those years to think of a way to save her, and what he did was give her a screwdriver. Why would I do that? 

Ten could accept a half-ass save of a woman he did not yet know, and did not yet love—utterly, completely, absolutely.

Twelve, the man who spent four billion years trying to save Clara: would Twelve accept that half-save?

Would Twelve accept it in the face of the hint dropped at the end of “Name of the Doctor”? In the face of her point that, even with Clara gone, River persisted? Endured? In the face of her jaunty “Spoilers”?

 

He has learned something. He’s learned his prior self gave her a diary she presumed to be the length of her own life—and that this alone has haunted her. She’s lived with the knowledge of her fate looming over her—and looming over him. They’ve lived waiting for something that could not be avoided forever…that both witnessed in the end. By the end of “Husbands of River Song,” he’s realized that her worry, her knowledge of her own ending—HIS knowledge of her ending—has colored their entire relationship, and for the worse.

Which, then, leads us to a logical point: these two star-crossed lovers have never been free to experience each other outside that closed loop created at the end of “Forest of the Dead.” They can’t, and won’t, experience each other freely unless the hidden escape routes suggested in the nature of her “save” and the hints of “Name of the Doctor” are fulfilled, and they begin a new loop of relationship free of “doom.” Or at least, free except for the doom we all face. Both the Doctor and River are right: there is no eternal happiness. All things end. But happily ever after is just having time—to know each other, love each other, experience each other, without the doom of knowing the time of death warping their relationship.

Capaldi’s Doctor, though, is the perfect Doctor to set up an escape route from that. He’s the doctor who, himself, has been given a new lease on life—a new set of regenerations. He’s the one who’s fought four billion years for Clara. He’s the one who, both wiser and better prepared than Ten, gives her a sonic—and promptly scans her body with it. And then beams her up to the Tardis, assuring us of two loopholes by which her “saved” mind can be linked to a “saved” body.

Ten has no way of knowing if Twelve saved River’s body. But Twelve has every reason to know Ten saved her mind—and that the body is all that’s lacking.

Which brings us to a logical issue: Alex Kingston has reached the very edge of the period in which she can plausibly have yet to be the River Song we see in “Forest of the Dead.” Age may not wither, nor custom stale River or her beauty, but mortal actresses can only keep up the illusion so long. Either the role must end—or a route into a new life in which she can age naturally has to begin.

So—do we believe this is the end?

It can be the end. It’s a good, clear place for Moffat to leave River and the Doctor—especially as he’s begun the long process of preparing to leave the show. (Not this coming season, but someday in a future he can now imagine…) He can close River’s life down, now, even with the logical weirdness and the hints of “Name of the Doctor” remaining.

But do we BELIEVE it?

Of THIS Doctor?

Do we believe the Doctor of Face the Raven, and Heaven Sent, and Hell Bent will let River go at exactly the moment we see him fully, completely accept that he loves her to pieces? And that she really does love him? Is the Twelve we’ve seen going to go hurtling into the final date of the Singing Towers at the very moment of real, engaged love? Is it credible? Is it plausible?

I’d argue that it is totally implausible at the end of this season, of all seasons, that he would reach the revelation of that much love—and accept her doom, and walk them straight into it. Unless he realized that only by going THROUGH her doom could they be free. Only by sending her to the Library can they be free of the certainty of that “final” outcome. Only by sending her PAST the last pages of her diary can they start over, free of the foreknowledge of her presumed death.

So much of what we see in this episode argues continuation, not completion. So much goes into reminding us that River is, like Clara, a near-match for the Doctor. We’re reminded that if she’s “Professor Song,” she’s also “Doctor Song.” That if she’s “Cheated” on spouses with multiple marriages, he, too, has. (And I will always love their grumbly little spat over each other’s marriages: his to Queen Elizabeth I, to  Marilyn Monroe, to Cleopatra.  Hers to Hydrofax/diamond, Ramone, and Steven Fry (Same as Cleopatra…)) They both use the Tardis, they both struggle to save the ship, they work in tandem to survive…

Both, adrift in time, are going to lead odd lives, with relationships that in a more standard time-line might seem “cheating,” or bigamous, but which in light of the scramble of eras they live in suggest only that “till death do you part” means something complicated when you could be alive or not alive in any given era…or any twist of the time-loop. But River is as much a proto-crypto Time Lady as Clara or Ashildr.

Missy reminded us at the start of this past season that she—alone of the regular squadron of characters—is the Doctor’s “peer.” She(, and Davros, and a very few others. She challenges Clara on that point, dismisses her—

And this season, if it is remarkable for anything, updated that limitation, adding Clara and Ashildr both as “equals” in time…paving the way for returning River to the same limited, precious pantheon.

Do we believe that, after this season of all seasons, the Twelfth Doctor will go straight from True Love Realized to “Goodbye”?

I keep looking at the final elements of the endings—of “Forest of the Dead,” of “Name of the Doctor,” and of “Husbands of River Song.”

There’s the blatant spoilers and the denial of proper “scientific” behavior in “Name.” Eleven’s agonized awareness of her, ability to touch her, hear her, her ability to continue on even when Clara is missing, her “spoilers,” all suggesting that the end is not the end we think it is.

And then there are the two parallel, echoing endings of “Forest,” and “Husbands.”

When the wind is fair…every day in a million, when the doctor comes, when the night is perfect…

No one dies.

Always, when you need it most, there is a Song.

And before that, in “Husbands,” there is the parable of the singing towers. Two towers, that abide together throughout the millennia, through all weathers, through all disasters, and between them they create something magic, something no one can explain, something that may have to do with the exact distance between the two—close but never joined, together but never merged—that lets both sing.

And a Doctor, for perhaps the first and only time, admitting he, too, sometimes “needs it most.” Needs a Song….

No. I don’t believe this is supposed to be “the end.” Not in the sense of closing a door no one can open again. Moffat may not: we don’t know how long he will stay with Doctor Who. We don’t know if, in that time, he will want to open the door to River again. But we do know he’s made it possible: for him, for Kingston, for Capaldi, and for any writer, director, and show-runner who comes after. He’s completed a triad of stories that provide loopholes, each pretending to be the end, each opening a slightly different set of doors to new beginnings, and most of all, each bringing the Doctor and River more and more into true parity—true marriage. When we first met River, Ten was young, still mourning Rose, still huddled in his safe friendship with Donna. She was the Wise Wife, who knew how much their love would mean: a River who arrives AFTER the night we see in “Husbands,” who knows not only that she loves, but that she is loved. The episodes that follow track us back and forth up and down time, showing us River’s vulnerability and her strength, her anger and her sweetness—showing us the Doctor’s growing belief that, yes, she is HIS River Song…until we see Eleven lose her, and be unable to bear even her “ghost” to remind him of what he has lost. And then we get Capaldi, who can see what even Eleven did not see: the River who doesn’t know she’s loved—who doesn’t believe he cares. Her sun, her stars, her monument—the man she loves with all her heart, but believes does not love her.

That’s a River none of the Doctors ever realized before. Ten accepted her, in the end, as the Wise Wife. Eleven, too—so young in so many ways—accepted her, missing what Rory and even Amy saw: their vulnerable child, grieving a love that slipped away one page of her diary at a time.

Only this Doctor sees her not only as the Wise Wife, but as the woman who, just like him, is afraid and alone. Only this Doctor sees that he’s leaned on her, trusted her, accepted her, used her, let her sacrifice herself for him—and he’s never risked loving her, or letting her know his love. Except, perhaps, Eleven, who only admits it to her “ghost.”

The loopholes to bring River back are easy. Loopholes are always easy in Doctor Who, not because Moffat is perverse, but because once you’ve got timey-wimey going, it’s not hard to bring back the dead—in new bodies or old, in one time loop or another. The Doctor Who universe militates against eternal death, and that’s not the fault of the writers or show-runners or actors. It’s built in, and was from the first time the Doctor regenerated within the framework of a world with a Tardis. Get past that and death shall have no dominion. But not every story begs for regenerations, for new adventures for ongoing stories.

I argue that as Moffat has built this, the Doctor and River do—he’s built the first truly compelling arc to justify an eternal being “in love with” another potential eternal. He created over seven years—seven series—two people whose lives are already a bit like those two singing towers—enduring, together and apart, doomed to die someday—but not today.

When the wind is fair. When the doctor comes calling. When the night is perfect. And always, when you need it most, there is a Song, and everybody lives.


	4. To Save One Life--a Narrative of Temporal Perspective. ***BIG***

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Be warned. This one is big, rambly, and pro-Moffat/pro-Capaldi/pro-River to the max.
> 
> One of the great puzzles to me is that so many people, evaluating authors, reduce them to their least expansive and provocative scale, dismissing any possibility that they might have planned and intended the echoes, layers of meaning, twining arcs, long-term developments...
> 
> So many critics, writing about television, write as though it might be a miracle of the show-writers even notived all the arcs in one episode, much less in a season, or a set of seasons. The dismissive and often bitterly reductionist view of episodic writing appals me more than a little, implying that show-writers know nothing of the shows for which they write, and show-runners do nothing to ensure that each episode will not in some way expand and enhance the greater scope of the shows they run. Sometimes it gets so small and petty and reductionist that one wonders whether writers and show runners are even capable of putting together the connection between oral hygiene and tooth-decay, or looking both ways before crossing the street and safely making it to the other side.

One Life—a Matter of Temporal Perspective

 

An associate commented on the previous meta, saying she was watching the Marathon of stories, ending in The Husbands of River Song.  Her comment got me thinking. Or, ok, thinking even more than I was, which is saying something.

Needless to say, I’m a fan of Moffat’s. Where other people see “too clever” or “misogynistic” or any of a number of other sins, I see a writer who works on a scale big enough to really spread out and get some traction in, with a heart even bigger than he canvases—and a sense of the center-line of a big story.

Now, I’m going to say upfront: I think a lot of what people do not like about him grows out of his strengths, and how they appear when seen in fragmentary conditions. One of the things I’ve come to realize over the past few years is that even in this era of TIVO and streaming tv and Netflix and binge watching, viewers tend to think very small—an episode at a time, and sometimes not even that. I’ve seen viewers who judged an entire piece on the basis of a scene, or a few lines, never integrating them into the whole of the episode, much less the whole of a season, or of a multi-season arc.

Viewers are even worse at sorting out arcs that aren’t clearly labeled and marked with yellow high-lighter. Arcs that aren’t telegraphed, reprised, summarized, and put to bed with a concluding catch phrase are often dismissed as being hallucinatory on the part of those who see them. After all, apparently no writer would ever attempt a narrative you had to wait for—unravel—or reweave, putting the tapestry together a thread at a time.

Here’s the thing—if ever there were a property, a franchise, a series that warrants the occasional long, un-marked, unlabeled story that needs to be put together, it’s Doctor Who. When else is a writer going to come across a chance to work in a narrative with over fifty years in the heart and mind of the public, a mythos that weaves through multiple regenerations, through epic narratives, and through not just ONE time-line, but through multiple revised histories of the universe? If ever there was a character and a story that deserved at least one long, tangled, complicated story told on the Doctor’s scale, rather than the viewer’s scale, it’s this one. We may think an episode at a time. The Doctor, though, lives in millennial chunks, and his stories are not inevitably neat and compact, much as some viewers seem to think they “should” be. (Yes. I’m being peevish and snide. I’ve run into too many Monday-Morning Quarterbacks whining that a Good Episode should be short, and snappy, and entirely self-contained…as though the only possible standard of narrative goodness was a Little Golden Book or at the most a Nancy Drew novel.)

So, here I am, not only arguing for big stories that are not always either obvious or easy to find—but arguing that the Doctor deserves such stories, and that Moffat is one of the rare writers who’s a) been given true, full access to that arena and b) shown the kind of thinking that might be trusted to actually USE that opportunity. And I’m going to go on, and say that, IMO, the River Song narrative may well be that story.

Let’s start with Moffat taking over as Show Runner for Russel Davies. I’m not going to compare the two men, at least not much, beyond saying that Moffat was left with a bit of a tangle on his hands. Davies had left Moffat with the aftermath of a vast, emotional narrative currents to deal with. Moffat did have one advantage—having been there for the story leading up to RTD’s departure. He knew what he was walking into. In spite of that, he was handed the conclusion of an entire time-line, the regeneration of a Doctor, the loss of a popular companion, and an audience that had grown quite used to—and fond of—RTD’s very distinct take on Doctor Who—a take that was, in many ways, radically different from that of the original.

Davies was a unique cross of cynic and sentimentalist. He wrote a Doctor weak in ways he had never been weak before—traumatized, cut off from his people, a genocidal killer who has wiped out two races, alone, despairing, only to be revived and brought back to life—and love—by yet another human companion, Rose Tyler, herself elbow-deep in a blue-collar soap opera, with a dead father, a poor-white-trash mother, an out of work, weak-willed boyfriend…and a hunger for a bigger life, a bigger world, a bigger future. Davies wrote Eccleston first as entranced by nervy, chippy, hungry little Rose—and then, with Eccleston gone, upped the stakes still higher with David Tennant’s dreamy, romantic lover-boy, the first (and quite possibly the last) serious venture into the Doctor as a true, classic romantic lead, compounded of a traditional blend of angst, melancholy, dark past, high ideals, and gobs of sentiment. It was not, shall we say, your grandfather’s Doctor.

And then it was gone. Davies was off and away on Torchwood. Tennant was gone in a tragic, forlorn rush. Donna, his former companion, who might otherwise have provided continuity, preceded him. And there Moffat was—Moffat, who is many things, but who was not and is not a Russell Davies. And he had to take charge and decide what HIS Doctor Who should be—and what it could be at the beginning of the arc.

It’s become clear over the years that Moffat’s Doctor is more old-school than Davies’.  He’s more truly alien. Less convincingly a romantic lead. In some ways more solitary—but less likely to “solve” this by falling in love with his pretty ingénue chav companion. In the end, a “better” man in the sense that Moffat’s preferred Doctor is not, and cannot be, a genocidal killer of two races. More curious in his own right—where much of Davies’ era Doctor was looking on his companions to be the new, curious, fascinated neophyte whom he dragged from one famous site to the next, Moffat’s Doctor is almost as new, as curious, as cat-fascinated as his companions. More, even—where they may hang back and grumble caution, Moffat’s Doctors surge forward, eyes alert, noses quivering, looking for the next thrill offered in a universe that will never fall short of novelty—and if by some insane chance it does, a quick time-flush and reboot will provide the Doctor with an entirely new history to explore, unlike the last history in just enough detail to be seriously fascinating.

Not that Moffat could easily start there. Not with an audience entirely used to David Tennant and Rose and LURV. So somehow Moffat had to make both a clean, fresh start, with all-new key actors and an all-new universe post-reset, but with an audience primed to want more of the Davies narratives.

I’ve always suspected that Matt Smith, dear though he is, and Amy and Rory, were his compromise choices—his transition, letting him ease his way back to an older model of Doctor…a more Capaldi model, who could address some of the issues RTD’s Doctor had made mandatory, but not easily answered in a Moffat universe.

The biggest issue was romance. Davies’ Doctor was a romantic. “A lover not a fighter.” If Moffat himself wrote one of the classic, defining examples of that mode—“The Woman in the Fireplace,” with David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor going positively soppy for Madame de la Pompadour—there’s still no getting around the fact that the RTD Doctors were emotionally, romantically vulnerable in a way that prior Doctors had not been—and that there’s little indication Moffat wanted them to be again. Not that Moffat appears to want emotionless, loveless Doctors, but that on the whole he’s been evading the Romeo and Juliet, juvenile soap-opera first set under way by Rose, and then made more extreme by Tennant’s romantic take on Ten.

And we are now (TA-DA!) at the point  wanted to reach two pages back.

Moffat’s attempt to resolve the issues of love made inescapable by Davies’ version of the Doctor.

Moffat, somewhere in the third or fourth season, would have learned that his Future Awaited him in Season Five—to take up the role of show-runner and continue the ongoing history of Doctor Who. He had some lead time. He had the experience to already know what he himself least liked about Davies’ rendition of Who. And heaven knows, when he found he’d be starting from a cold, cruel position of all-new Doctor and Companion, after a crashing, giant resolution of a narrative ending with the re-boot of the universe, he’s got to have thought about how the hell he was going to cope.

There’s the obvious—he needed a new Doctor and a new Companion, and enough elements to lure viewers into feeling they were at least on familiar territory. Which, I suspect in the end made young, adorable-geeky Matt Smith too tempting to walk away from: he was on the one hand young and charismatic enough to carry over some of Tennant’s more obvious allure as a potential romantic lead, while being quirky and wonky enough to help Moffat cancel that aspect of the character out. He could both tempt those who loved a love-story, while being odd enough and wary enough of old pain to justify his reluctance to go with Amy where once Tennant had gone with Rose…and with other female characters. He was an almost clownlike naif…a wonderful return to an older, less sexualized Doctor.

Amy’s attraction to him and her own Doctor/Rory quandary provided the love-interest.

What she could not manage, though, was to resolve the Doctor’s own conflict…a conflict that once established could not simply disappear again.

Before Davies one could accept the Doctor as asexual, a-romantic, and intensely unsentimental about LURV. If he was lonely, it was for the chummy, mentor-mentee relationship of a teacher and his students. After Davies that could not be proposed—not without divorcing Davies’ versions of the Doctor from all those before and after…a notion that would have been in direct conflict with the unifying aspects of the show—the constancy of the Doctor regardless of who played him or what regeneration he was in. Yes, the Doctor’s personality may vacillate: but the key truths about who the Doctor is do not change. If he has been established as being on some level romantic, passionate, and lonely for a romantic bond, that can’t just go away. It has become part of the master template of The Doctor. It is possible to downplay it, to put it off by mismatching him, to evade it by presenting him as wary and burned once, twice shy…but it can’t go away. Davies had added a dimension to the Doctor that wasn’t going anywhere, especially with an entire modern fandom lurking in the wings waiting to see how Moffat’s Doctor would resolve Davies’ conundrum: who does the Doctor find to LOVE?

Now, I am not in a good position to say that Moffat, in the run-up to his takeover as show-runner, invented River Song specifically to answer that question. But I do think he might have been a clever, clever boy to do so—and he certainly has been a clever, clever boy to capitalize upon her since then to serve that function.

The biggest conflict between Davies’ romantic Doctors and the Old Classic build had as much to do with juvenile elements as with love itself. AS some have pointed out, it’s not as though it were ever a secret that the original Doctor had at some point been a father—and a grandfather—and thus presumably someone’s lover or husband. One in fact is tempted by the original Doctor to suspect he loved well, deeply, and grieved whatever separated him from his first family, leaving him with only Susan, with whom he ran away. It’s an origin story that suggests trauma, tragedy, or both, throwing grandfather and granddaughter adrift in a stolen Tardis, on the run from the law. An old man, fiercely holding on to his grandchild and the possibility of a future…

The problem is that the original Doctor’s love, by definition, seems almost certain to have been fairly adult. He’s not living, or mourning, like a young man. His later incarnations are, if anything, not willing to replace the cherished and lost first love with anything lesser—no Companions, no sloe-eyed alien seductresses. If one can argue that it’s just a little boy’s sci-fi paradise, with girls as chums but not lovers, it doesn’t undo the underlying premise that the original Doctors were not looking to replace whatever they had in the years before…in the sexual years suggested but never examined.

Davies’ Doctors were, conversely, far more a teenaged girl’s heartthrob crush: sensitive, injured, romantic older men tumbling inarticulately, but celibately into sigh-filled, anguished love. They were looking for an air-brushed cross between Lolita and a manic-pixy-dream-girl to save them from their own melancholy despair and the sheer burden of their years.

The answer, if an answer is to be found, has to carry a new Doctor from where Davies left Tennant to something reflecting the adult, mature, complex love implied but never shown in the original. Somehow Moffat had to move the Doctor, a step at a time, from Rose/Madame Pompadour/Queen Elizabeth I and so on and so forth, to some sense that the Doctor has at last, once again, found an adult man’s adult relationship…a relationship that frees us from projecting libido onto every man-girl relationship the Doctor has with a Companion.

And so, we are handed River, whose first appearance is as a woman—a grown, experienced woman older than David Tennant’s Doctor, more aware than his Doctor, more knowledgeable of their shared history than he is—and who loves him with a complexity and completeness that allows he to sacrifice herself and foreshadow a truly great—and adult—love story. Not Rose, who seems infinitely too young for any of the Doctors, but River Song, who’s in some ways older than he is…

I am in absolutely no position to say whether Moffat knew he was setting the hook at that time. I tend to think he did know—that he knew already that she was to be the alternate to Amy, that she would turn Amy from the new Doctor’s potential love to his mother-in-law. That she would lead him on a long saga to adulthood, eventually concluding in a regeneration that would not only start the whole cycle over, but start it over much as it had begun, with an older Doctor—a more mature, gruff Doctor, who would know love as an adult husband, not as a juvenile beau.

Even if Moffat did not know he wanted River for this, he sure as hell worked out how to use her for that.

It’s time, then, to do something seldom done, so near as I can tell. People have spent much time and energy trying to sort out River’s life from River’s POV. What order did it progress in. How did it look to her?

Oddly, what no one seems to do much is look at River through the eyes of the Doctor—to look at the chronological progression he himself experiences.

So, let’s start by looking at the episodes, in order, which bring the Doctor back and forth across River’s timeline.

First, of course, the two initial narratives:

Silence in the Library

Forest of the Dead.

These two set David Tennant’s young Doctor up with a premonition of love—and a pounding, melodramatic, Davies’ appropriate, Tennant-appropriate introduction to his One True Love: the mysterious, strong, capable, wise River Song, who not only beats the Doctor at his own game—but dies rather saving him rather than lose one second of the life she’s known with him.

Come on, people: Most Romantic Intro EVAR! How can you beat it?

Stop and view it from the POV of the Doctor as he is at the time of those two eps. He’s still recovering from Rose—but Rose was always in so many ways a juvenile dream. A teenager’s crush. And she was doomed from the start…they would never be peers. She would never be his true match. She would never know his name. She would never meet him—and beat him—at his own schtick. He would lose her when he himself tricked her and set her aside—a little girl forever mourned, but never his equal in any sense. A girl given a human/Time Lord clone as a consolation prize, because a Real Time Lord was just too high caliber for her to ever cope with as a peer.

So David Tennant’s Doctor gets a mind-blowing lure: somewhere out there, somewhen, he will encounter his own true mate…and the hint and foreshadow is every bit as romantic and emotional as David Tennant’s/Davies’ Doctor could wish for. She dies! For him! He saves her! She waits for him—in his future, and forever in his present, caught in the Library.

Then whoops, hey-presto, we’re off with Amy and Rory and Eleven, and for the first three eps it looks like River is forgotten—no more than a memory from a past life.

Then in the fourth and fifth eps with Matt Smith, she’s back, with the Byzantium and the weeping angels, and she remains older than he is, wiser than he is, more in control: in these two stories she’s the Doctor to his Companion role, a reversal that people began to object to about that time, not seeing it as part of a logical and necessary development arc…and not seeing that if the Doctor is ever to have a peer, she must actually be a peer, someone who can, in some sense, in some context, be as capable and powerful as he is.

These early episodes, though, are crucial in establishing River as being, eventually, in her own life, an adult—experienced, skilled, and fully aware that she’s dealing with her “husband” when he’s a comparative child at the very start not only of their relationship—but of his own recovery from his regression over the Davies era—scarred veteran Eccleston seeking his Lolita giving way to juvvie-hear-throb Tennant playing Romantic Lead to eventually Lost Boy-child Smith, each physically and emotionally younger than the next. River—older, wiser, tougher River—challenges Smith’s Doctor to grow up, to become an adult, to turn into the man who could love her.

At first she is always his elder, his guide, his challenge. Then, step by step, they move toward each other—and then pass each other, at the time of A Good Man Goes To War, when he’s at last told who she is—Amy and Rory’s daughter, born on his Tardis, for whom he himself made a cradle—and she is slowly entrusted to his care as she becomes younger, more confused, more torn to pieces by her own growing-up tragedies and torments. AS she moves backward, he becomes her anchor, her ideal, her hope…and she becomes the younger.

Through it all we’re invited to experience the Doctor’s bewildered attempt to understand who the real River Song is…all the while knowing as he does where she ends. How the story turns out.

From a point before Davies’ departure all the way through this most recent Christmas, we’re taken on a long trip that turns the Doctor back into the adult he once was…and River’s story is at the heart of it.

Matt Smith’s Doctor loses Amy, and Rory—and he might as well lose River, too, at that point. He knows where she ends. He knows where they end. He’s left, in exactly the place to reprise the heart of the question suggested by Davies’ Doctor?

Who is there for the Doctor to love?

Who can be his anchor? What is permanent in his life? Or is he truly, eternally alone with child-ephemerals, mortals born to die in the blink of an eye?

That brings us up to Clara.

Clara is offered as a false, red-herring answer that Matt Smith’s Doctor can plausibly, realistically chase after with a passion and need that makes perfect sense after “The Doctor’s” preceding history—Rose, Martha, Donna, Amy, Rory…River.

The Impossible Girl. The girl he finds woven through time. The soufflé girl. The bargirl/governess. The teacher. The woman Missy tosses up on his shore. The eternal one. Impossible.

A girl he can hope to never lose.

A girl who can die only to arrive again—and again.

A companion for all time.

An easy answer that lets him turn away from the difficulty of River Song, to go chasing after the kind of easy, fun, frothy adventure the Doctor has always loved—and the Davies’ era Doctors adored. A “girlfriend” without any of the difficult baggage of adult relationship.

It’s even better after Danny Pink, when she herself wants the trappings of boyfriend/girlfriend with none of the pain. When she can be a pseudo-doctor, running away from pain and loss not one whit less than he is.

She’s a lie, of course. She’s not him—as her ultimate death reminds them both. She’s not without cost. She’s not cheap. She’s not a girlfriend. She’s not impossible, and she’s not eternal…not in the way he had hoped.

The Moffat era story of the Doctor leads him right up to the edge of adulthood with Amy and Rory and River. He and River stand together and lose Amy and Rory to the Angels, in Manhattan. They are almost out of secrets. She is almost as old as she was when he first met her. Almost…

And neither takes the step to become the lovers suggested by “Silence in the Library” or “Forest of the Dead.”

Yes, there are hints and suggestions, some in mini-stories, some in the episodes themselves, telling us that they have become lovers. That they are a couple. But it’s not the couple we first saw hinted at in those first two episodes—nor is Matt Smith’s Doctor seeming to be capable of moving into adulthood…

He seems so natural in his frantic race to find Clara, to cling to her, to accept her as his next answer…an answer free of the complexity and grief and pain of River and her entire history—River who tows lost Amy and Rory in her wake. River who will die.

Matt Smith’s Doctor snatches at the easy, boyish answer: a new girlfriend. A new adventure. A race away from what had been…a run-away movement that Moffat has increasingly suggested was implied in the Doctor from the first.

And the—then, Ta-Da, we get the regeneration, and the arrival of Capaldi’s Doctor, who in so many ways refutes what Smith’s Doctor and his predecessors have tried to be. In a peculiar way, he’s a Doctor who has retreated as far as he can retreat, regressed as far as he can regress, whose back is now against the wall and who returns not as a young, pretty, sweet fellow, but as an old curmudgeon wearing a face that, we eventually learn, was chosen to remind him of ONE thing: that he can’t save all lives, but that sometimes he can save ONE life.

Will it be Ashildr’s life?

No—over time we’re brought to the conclusion that, for better or worse, the Doctor did Ashildyr no real favor in saving her from time and death. It’s not Ashildr he can save.

Is it Clara? The Impossible Girl?

No. In the end the Impossible Girl “saves” herself on her own terms, with the knowledge of her own death waiting just as certain as the Doctor knows River’s death is waiting…and in saving herself, she takes herself entirely from the Doctor’s intimate memories, reducing herself to a story he knows, and feels, can tell—but can’t properly remember.

Then, and only then, do we circle back to the end of this season—the Christmas story, the home where all classic Western-Christianized resurrection stories start. The Tardis takes the Doctor where he needs to be, trying to give him what he needs, whether it be isolation, or antlers—or an encounter with River Song.

And here, at last, the story suggested by River’s original death is made manifest, because it is here, and then, that the Doctor experiences her—and himself—as his adult match: as lost, as vulnerable, as afraid of being unloved as he has ever been. As sarky, and sarcastic, and amoral, and adventurous as he has ever been—and maybe more. Or not… As multiply married. As given to telling lies to protect her own fragile feelings.

The Doctor chased after the Impossible Girl hoping for a companion who would never die…who would remain, eternally on an adventure with him. He lost her—she was always a red herrings. He wore a face to remind him he could save one life---sometimes—and the lives were never the lives he thought they should be. Until he was brought full circle, and landed at the towers of Darillium, with River Song, whose life must soon be saved. Who must receive a sonic screwdriver, and know a love so big, and real, and profound that her original appearance is fully justified—her original sacrifice made perfectly understandable.

I keep trying to decide if, in the end, she will be freed from the Library, or if the Library will prove to be the eternal fortress that allows her to become his eternal peer. By the end of “Name of the Doctor” we know that her “ghost” is not what the Doctor thought it would be: that it’s more alive, and vital, and enduring, and free than he expected. I’m not sure it matters, really—in this last episode the Doctor has finally been brought back to adulthood—as  a man, as a lover, as an adventurer. He’s not just running away any more, or retreating into easy answers. His lover is not a Lolita, or a teenaged fantasy, or a mystery, or an Impossible Girl: she’s flawed, frightened, lonely, brave River Song, who is no angel, but who loves him with courage and valor, and whom he finally has the courage to love properly in return. His match, his mate, his equal “tower.”

That’s a long story—and, to me, it’s a story Moffat seems to have understood from very early on, if not from the first. It’s a story that makes sense, for two time travelers who meet and cross stories over and over, in forward gear and in retrograde action throughout centuries of their mutual lives.  People have argued that River’s life is “about” the Doctor—but that’s right and fitting for both her birth—and her years coming to an independent and mature adulthood as his wife. It can be said as surely that his life comes to be “about” her, until the path to maturity upon which he follows her comes to define him…until she becomes his salvation, and he hers.

River—and the Doctor’s long, long path to finally becoming her proper husband—has been a crucial element in bringing the Doctor out of the juvvie heart-throb character Davies made him, returning him effectively to the older, wiser man who HAS a love, has a knowledge of what he wants that will not ever again be easily answered by a Companion. River’s existence has been a huge part of the trip that has taken the Doctor out of the realm Davies created: PTSD warrior, genocidal survivor, longing Humbert Humbert running away into childish romances to replace the experience of having peers.

Now he’s got peers again: Gallifrey is back. Missy has commanded her right to be recognized as his oldest, closest associate, beyond friendship or enmity. Davros has commanded his place, as the Oldest Enemy and First Error. UNIT is back. Ashildyr and Clara have been added to the Pantheon. And it’s River’s track that has, a step at at time, been part and parcel of leading the Doctor back out of that vast abyss of lonely, half-mad, guilty isolation.

I don’t know how long Moffat will want to stay. I don’t know if he will find, having finally brought the Doctor back to his roots without having to deny or repudiate his Davies detour, that he actually now wants to see where HE can go starting from scratch. In many ways his entire time as Doctor Who show-runner can be seen as remedial, finding a way to recover the first Doctors without destroying what Davies accomplished with New Who. Now that he’s got Doctor Who’s full range back, and has given him an entire collection of peers fully up to his weight, will Moffat find he’s got stories to tell? Or will he realize all he wanted with all his heart was to bring the Doctor back to adulthood, and give him his One True Wife—a wife as isolated and independent as he is?

I don’t know. But I do find myself convinced by my own argument.

 I’m not always. Sometimes I make an argument and end up shrugging and saying, “I can see the pattern, but I think it’s an accident.”

I don’t think the arc of River, and the arc of the Doctor’s return to an “adult” role, is an accident. I think River and Clara and Amy and Rory and the entire thing was a planned “dream,” like the trip to Oz, to return the Doctor to his self of old—his former magnitude and adulthood. I think on the whole Moffat knew what he was doing all along—and that as he told story after story in apparent forward gear, episode by episode and arc by arc—he was also telling an even vaster story that contained the lesser arcs, and the lesser episodes, that was planned from the very beginning to end, ultimately, with an “adult” doctor, with an “adult” love, and a world bigger and more whole than the wounded world Christopher Eccleston came staggering in from, to find Rose Tyler and a fantasy of innocence.


	5. To Go Where No Mere Companion Has Gone Before...

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which I think I wrap up what I want to say about River, the Doctor, and What Moffat Hath Wrought....

So. We now have an adult Doctor, an adult River—and an “apparent” death-transmigration to the Library in her future and his past. Judging by the tears and the overtones, it seems at least possible that the Doctor (Capaldi’s Doctor, as of “The Husbands of River Song”) believes that whatever else is true, this is the end of her physical life.

But we’ve been given hints—hell, he has been given hints—suggesting that her pent up years in the Library are going to ultimately resolve in some other outcome than her virtual life without him in a fantasy even less satisfying and complete than Rose’s, with her mortal Clone Doctor. Hints? No. We’ve been whapped upside the head with a clue-by-four or more.

Let’s look at what we learn in “The Name of the Doctor,” so neatly obscured by all the other busy plot details.

  1. River knows Madame Vastra and Jenny and Strax, and they know her. They know to summon her when the Doctor is in trouble, they know HOW to summon her when the Doctor is in trouble, they treat her as the senior member of the Doctor Supervisory Team, superior even over Madame Vashtra—and they and River treat Clara as exactly what she is: the new girl on the block who’s got pretensions above her justified status. She does: Clara considers herself hot stuff, important, a proto-Doctor, the Doctor’s main squeeze. She does not realize that she’s just another damned companion of at least dozens, if not probably hundreds or even thousands over his lifetime. Compared to River and Vashtra and Jenny and Strax, whose contact with the Doctor spans centuries of the Doctor’s lives, Clara at that point is a one-trick pony: she hasn’t even taken her dive into the Doctor’s time-line yet. But Clara, in classic Clara fashion, believes she’s Important and deserving of not just a bit of respect, but serious equal standing. The bossy control freak honestly can’t conceive of these strangers to her being senior to her in the Doctor’s life.
  2. River is able to consciously, of her own will, form a lasting link with Clara, without Clara’s knowledge or desire. If we had any doubt that the “ghost” Madame Vashtra summoned is alive and self-willed, that pretty much clears up that question. She may be trapped in the Library, but she’s alive and making choices and imposing her will as she chooses.
  3. The sense we get overall is that River’s been in the Library for a LONG time at the point we encounter her in the séance. She’s not the newly-rescued let’s-play-house newbie she was at the end of “Forest of the Dead.” She’s a matron and a matriarch when she appears in “Name of the Doctor.”
  4. She does not appear to know the extent of her liberty. She knows she can tag along with Clara. She knows she can enter and exit the Tardis and actively interact with it—allowing her to open the Tardis doors and reminding us that she, alone among women, knows the Doctor’s Real Name. Those things alone should have our—and her—alarms whooping like an old Star Trek rerun just as the photon-torpedoes are flying and the bridge consoles are going up like Fourth fo July fireworks….but we will accept that she’s already used to some of her odd and unprecedented abilities—and too busy to really notice others.
  5. We know she’s jealous of Clara. She and the Impossible Girl face off like two women who both know that they represent conflicting paths the Doctor can walk on. He can go with Clara, the “mistress,” or find a way back to River, the wife. In this loop of the story he’ll go with Clara. But in the process Moffat will set up for another, future loop, in which he can go back to his proper spouse.
  6. How? That’s a good one. Stop and think: she can leave the Library. She can link with people—with or without their permission. Linking, she can tag along. She’s free in space and time, though she may need Vashtra’s help to set it up. But once she’s got her ride, she’s free already. That freedom includes the ability to interact with the solid, mortal world—as the bit with the Tardis suggests. And, more important—
  7. At the end of her stay we learn that the Doctor can always see her. Always hear her. He can not only touch her physically—he can snog her till they both go all glowy and gusty. And he’s promised to come back to her.



 

So stop and think about this. She’s got an eternal virtual home-base in a Library that appears to be pretty close to eternal. Even if it’s not eternal, judging by her ability to go to Trenzalore itself and back in time to Vashtra and Jenny and Strax, we can pretty much assume River’s got most of what she would need to travel space and time from beginning to end. She can do it as a hitch-hiker, clinging to a Clara. But she can also do it without Clara. Whether that means she’s fully free is a good question—maybe she’s hitching a ride attached to the Doctor instead. But she can still travel far and wide, just as he can with his Tardis. Far from being the trapped wife, hidden in purdah, no longer able to range time and space, she’s instead set up perfectly for a really hot game of “anything you can do I can do better” with her Time-Hopping husband  and his Little Blue Box.

As well, whatever she is now, however it works, it includes the option of “conjugal visitation,” a fact they work out with his grasp on her wrist, and their shared snog. Even if no one else ever sees his wife, he can see her, hear her, touch her…and vice versa.

She’s set up to be the Ghost in “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” only on super steroids.

Further, we don’t know if she can get in and out of the Library as a body. It is still a logical premise. We don’t know if she can win back her regeneration abilities…but there’s very little to rule it out.

In essence right now River can become absolutely, totally, indestructibly the Doctor’s True Wife. When he leans over her in “The Husbands of River Song,” and murmurs, “Indestructible as ever,” he may have no clue just how overwhelmingly right he is. Give her the option of new regenerations of some sort, so that over time she can change actresses if she likes, and River becomes fully the equal to Missy/Master as the Doctor’s eternal, forever peer.

In “Husbands,” the Doctor compares them to the two singing towers—forever together, forever just sufficiently apart. But it’s “Name of the Doctor” that gives that parable teeth—teeth one suspects the Doctor does not realize even now.

It would take very little to make her unkillable. Eternal. With a forever-home base inside the Library, a link to ensure her memories are never lost, a databank that will hold billions of years of her experiences, and the ability to move in and out of the virtual world as she likes. Then add in all the virtual worlds beyond, that she could invade, usurp, explore—from the Dalek overmind to the Great Intelligence to Missy’s cyber Underworld of the Remembered Dead. She and Clara, between them, can struggle over those infinite digital realities. River is capable of being set up so that, if anything, it’s the Doctor who’s the Mayfly to her Eternal Self, rather than her being his ephemeral partner.

And she comes with a family—a family he gave her. Children he gave her; Charlotte Lux, and Donna’s two virtual children, and the ghosts of her own team. She is a matriarch, a mother…

All of that is not really a long stretch—it’s canon, or so obviously implied by canon that avoiding the implications starts requiring the sort of retcon rationalized reasoning that used to win you a No Prize from Stan Lee, or gain you prestige among the Baker Street Irregulars as they play the Great Game. You can find reasons why what I’ve written above might not be true—but you have to come up with REASONS for it not to be true, or it all follows from what we’re shown to date. Because we know: she survives. She endures. She makes contacts and friends outside her limits in the Library. She travels. She has physical power over a physical universe. She can move up and down the time stream.

Most of all—she never, never, never seems to stop loving and protecting her Doctor, even to the point of letting him follow Clara…risk his life to save a girl who isn’t her. She watches over him from her secure lair in the Library. She attends to his safety. She serves as his guardian angel. She becomes part of a team that oversees his well-being. She never stops loving her husband…

Epic—

As a woman who’s tried for years to explain to men why women keep wanting to impose “romance” on brawny, good-old-boy narratives, River is in a sense the perfect place to point and say what I once said to a Trek fan.

We want our marriages—our loves, our husband/wife (or husband/husband, or wife/wife) bonds to be valorized and made heroic IN THE SAME WAY BROMANCE HAS ALWAYS  BEEN VALORIZED. We want, on some level, for people to recognize that the intensity of romantic love, and, yes, particularly male-female love, can match the intensity of love between Two Guys With a Car and a Vendetta To Attend To.

Historically romance has always been treated as the smaller, sillier, less meaningful little sister of bromance. Even epic love is secondary to those Great Friend Relationships Between Men. (Women’s friendships are ranked even lower than romance—they may last for life, but they’re always outranked by love and marriage…for some good logical reasons that, for some reason, are NEVER reflected in the largely identical male-friend narrative…)

Who you love, with all your heart and all your life and all your courage, is who you are. It defines your story. Men have traditionally written a culture and a narrative in which marriage is NOT that defining love, though: God, career, and buddies always  outrank women. Bros before hos.

River, bless her, offers us the narrative we’ve always wanted; the husband-wife match between potential equals: equal in power, in time, in flawed humanity, in the blended scale of epic and miniature. What Moffat has given us, far from being the rather annoying perfect feminista superiorista goddess, is a fallible but loving human as versatile as the Doctor himself.

Moffat has said of Doctor who that it’s the perfect predator in the TV world: you can change anything about it, and it will keep on going. You can change directors, show-runners, actors. You can change styles. You can change mood and mode. You can leap from fairy-tale to hard SF to soap opera..and it just keeps going. All it lacked was a female role as perfectly designed to keep on ticking, Energizer Rabbit style, keeping up with the Doctor, functioning as that perfectly near-perfectly far tower we were given as a metaphor in “Husbands.”

Me? I think if Moffat really does know what he’s built—and if anyone does, it’s him, after all—then he knows he’s given us what we’ve been begging for all along: a woman who’s capable of truly BEING the Doctor’s equal. A woman as perfect for that perfect predator series as the Doctor is himself. A blend of timelessness and mayfly humanity. A blend of love and isolation. Always together, always distant. Capable of the potential to gain new regenerative abilities—new actresses and old. New times. To be both Goddess and mere loving, lonely woman. To be the Doctor’s perfect match—and the woman most likely to get into a stupid fight with him on a Thursday, swan off on a Friday, and find her way back in time for a nice pot roast dinner on a Sunday, so long as you’re not too fussy which centuries those various days fall in.

So—Am I right? Is River an amazing construct who really looks set to become almost anything?


End file.
